Assay test kits currently are available for testing a wide variety of medical and environmental conditions or compounds, such as a hormone, a metabolite, a toxin, or a pathogen-derived antigen. Most commonly these tests are used for medical diagnostics either for home testing, point of care testing, or laboratory use. For example, lateral flow tests are a form of immunoassay in which the test sample flows along a solid substrate via capillary action. Some tests are designed to make a quantitative determination, but in many circumstances all that is required is a positive/negative qualitative indication. Examples of such qualitative assays include blood typing, most types of urinalysis, pregnancy tests, and AIDS tests. For these tests, a visually observable indicator such as the presence of agglutination or a color change is preferred.
Readers for assays including, for example, lateral flow assays may use a camera for acquisition of images from the assay for subsequent processing and analysis. These readers may require an interface between the camera and a microcontroller that accesses images from the camera for subsequent processing and analysis. Conventional solutions of microcontroller-camera interfaces deploy a FGPA, a CPLD or a FIFO as the glue logic between the microcontroller and camera. The purpose of such glue logic is to stream images into a frame buffer located in its internal or external memory. The microcontroller can then access the image data inside the frame buffer for transmission or further processing.